What happened after that happened slowly and carefully and by the book, which Tom would think about later as its own kind of mercy. Nobody was thrown against a wall. Nobody shouted. Ruiz asked Curtis and Darrell to sit down in separate booths, at opposite ends of the diner, and they did, Curtis protesting the whole time in his warm wounded voice and Darrell saying nothing at all. Trooper Begay, a tall, quiet Navajo man with a gray crew cut, came in and stood by the door. Ruiz took Wren into the hallway by the bathroom, where she could see the dining room but nobody could hear, and crouched down to the girl's eye level, and talked with her for ten minutes in a low steady voice while Wren talked back, faster and faster, her hands moving.
Tom gave Trooper Begay the folded note from his breast pocket. Begay read it, and his face did not change, but he folded it again very carefully and put it in a plastic evidence sleeve.
Then Begay went outside to the Road King, and crouched by the rear fender, exactly where Darrell had crouched, and reached up under it, and came out with a small black magnetic box about the size of a matchbox. He held it up toward the window so Tom could see it through the glass. Then he bagged that too.
Behind the flour bins in the storeroom, Ruiz found an amber pill bottle with a pharmacy label from Ely made out to a woman named Edna Kincaid, eighty-one years old. Darrell's grandmother, it turned out. The bottle had held ninety tablets of a prescription sedative. There were eleven left. Beside it, in a plastic sandwich bag, was a small amount of white powder and a teaspoon.
Ruiz came out of the storeroom holding the bottle in a gloved hand and looked at Curtis for a long time without saying anything. Curtis stopped protesting.
At three fifty-two in the afternoon, Curtis Lowell Haney and Darrell James Kincaid were placed under arrest on charges that would eventually include administering a controlled substance to another without consent, possession of a controlled substance, conspiracy to commit grand larceny, and, once the Reno police got involved, a good deal more. The coffee mug went into an evidence bag. So did Tom's plate, because some of the coffee had spilled on it. Tom did not mind. He had lost his appetite.
As they walked Curtis out to the sheriff's SUV, he stopped in the doorway and turned and looked back at Wren, who was standing beside Deputy Ruiz with her arms wrapped around herself.
"After everything I did for you," Curtis said. "Roof over your head. Food in your mouth. This is how you pay me back."
Wren looked at him. She didn't say anything. She didn't have to. She just looked, steadily, until he turned away first.
The Eureka County Sheriff's substation was a low tan building on the main street of Eureka, which was not much of a main street: a handful of old brick buildings from the silver-mining days, an opera house, a hotel, a gas station, and a great deal of sky. Deputy Ruiz